The current art in space mission design involves the effort of a team of expert human engineers. Each engineer concentrates on a subsystem in a spacecraft. For example, an engineer may have responsibility for the spacecraft structure, while another handles the design of the electrical power subsystem. All of the other subsystems have the attention of their respective engineers. Throughout the design process, information flows between engineers to keep their designs synchronized. For example, the power engineer tells the structural engineer the mass of the electrical components, such as the battery, so the structure can be designed to support them. The exchange of information can cause individual engineers to rework their design in order to adapt to new information. Eventually, over a period of days, weeks or months, the process stabilizes on a viable design, and that becomes the recommendation of the team. Testing and validation of the intermediate and final designs is done by high-fidelity simulation and analysis tools. Specific hardware, modeled in these tools, is chosen to implement the design and any changes require a lengthy evaluation process to determine impacts to the rest of the spacecraft.
From a flight hardware perspective, spacecraft avionics customarily rely on one or more dedicated special purpose processors that are designed and fabricated to handle specific subsets of the avionics workload present in a traditional spacecraft. These subsets are based upon customary spacecraft subsystems and include communication, data handling, power management, attitude determination and control, propulsion, and payload interfaces. Traditional spacecraft design dictates that all hardware, such as processor circuit boards specifically designed to support particular spacecraft subsystems, undergo a lengthy and costly design phase, fabrication, followed by customization and interface testing together with their associated subsystem software. This time consuming process is traditionally required to provide a reliable, although costly, custom subsystem solution for each different spacecraft.